


The Rehearsal

by Mizmak



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Declarations Of Love, First Kiss, Happy Ending, M/M, Romance, Short & Sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-12
Updated: 2020-02-12
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:34:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22683304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mizmak/pseuds/Mizmak
Summary: Aziraphale has trouble declaring his feelings for Crowley, so he decides to rehearse them first to his empty bookshop...and things don't go entirely the way he anticipates.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 134





	The Rehearsal

He wanted to tell Crowley how he truly felt about him the day they celebrated saving the world at the Ritz.

He certainly tried saying it with his eyes during their toast, but faltered when it came to actual words – and then the moment passed.

Aziraphale invited him to the bookshop afterwards, to share a little wine, which turned into quite a lot of wine. He hoped the alcohol would loosen his tongue, but all it did was tie it up in slurred knots that never did get untangled.

“My dear fellow,” he said somewhere between the fourth bottle and the fifth, “There is some…some thing or other I want to tell you…is _very_ important. Terribly important….”

“Whassat?” Crowley said as he slid further down on the sofa, head lolling.

“ _Something_ ,” Aziraphale replied as he tried hard to get his tongue to match up with his brain. “Something about us. About you.” He pointed with an extravagant wave of his hand somewhere in Crowley’s direction.

“Hey, watch my glass—“ 

He’d nearly knocked Crowley’s wine glass down. “Sorry.” What had he been saying just then?

“So what issit?”

“Hm?”

Crowley pointed at himself. “Something about me. Important. Something or other…whatever.”

“Oh, right.” Aziraphale struggled to figure out what it was he wanted to say. How he felt. Yes. That was it. How he felt about his dearest friend. “It’s about us. That is, you. And about me.” He pointed at himself and missed, knocking his own hand against the other one holding his wine glass.

_Oops_. Wine spilled down his beautiful shirt and vest – a wretched red stain soaked into his splendid clothes and he utterly forgot his intentions towards Crowley in his horror. “ _Damn_.”

Crowley snapped his head up to stare drunkenly at him. “You swore.”

“Look at my clothes!” He set the glass down on the coffee table, and missed that as well. The glass fell onto the floor, and he watched as the remnants of wine trickled onto his Aubusson area rug. “ _Oh, fuck_.”

“Angel!” Crowley’s eyes went wide and his jaw dropped. “Language!” Then he leaned back and laughed.

Aziraphale stared morosely at all the red stains he could see where he didn’t want to see them. He sniffed. “You might try to be more shymp…more sympha…shympa…” Where were his words? “You might try caring more!”

“Yeah, yeah.” Crowley snapped his fingers. “There you go.”

The stains vanished from the rug and from his shirt and vest. Aziraphale looked down at his pristine clothing and smiled. “ _Thank you_.”

“Welcome.” And then Crowley dropped his head back against the sofa, closed his eyes, and let his wine glass slip from his fingers.

Aziraphale watched it fall to the floor. Luckily, it was empty. 

He looked at his dearest friend for whom he had certain _feelings_ that he knew he meant to tell him about if he could just find the right words.

His dearest friend was fast asleep.

Two days later he invited Crowley to lunch at a small café near the bookshop, followed by a stroll through St. James’s Park, where they stopped to feed the ducks.

That afternoon, as they leaned on the railing, Aziraphale felt slightly more confident. Much better, all in all, to do this while sober. Or so he believed, right up to the moment where he cleared his throat prior to saying what needed to be said.

He looked at Crowley, at his dark red hair catching glints of golden sunlight, at his delightfully prominent nose, at those expressive lips. He wished he could see more of his eyes but all he caught was a corner of his nearest one – a mere peek behind those infernal sunglasses.

He cleared his throat again, and looked at his dear friend’s elegantly loose shirt, open enough at the top to show wisps of chest hair. He stared at the elegant black jacket that tightly wrapped his frame, and then he looked at Crowley’s hand as he flung food at the ducks with those long, slender fingers.

_What was it he was going to say?_ Aziraphale coughed a little cough.

“Frog in your throat, Angel?”

“Um…sorry. No. I’m fine. Really.”

“Feed the ducks, then.” Crowley handed him the bag.

“Oh, yes, right. _Sorry_.” How on Earth was he going to declare his feelings? “Ducks.” 

Aziraphale tossed out some food and watched the birds squawk and squabble over the tidbits with a furious flutter of splashing wingbeats. 

“Play _nice_ ,” Crowley instructed the ducks, and he said it in such a way that the fluttering and splashing instantly decreased. 

The ducks paddled about in a much more civilized manner as Aziraphale finished feeding them. “Thank you.”

“Anytime.” Crowley stretched his back and arms. “Now what?”

_Good question. What now? Listen to inane natterings that don’t even come close to explaining love?_ Aziraphale sighed. “No idea.”

He was utterly sober, and he yearned to tell Crowley he loved him, and yet somehow his mind and tongue refused to cooperate. _Why?_

It was a beautiful sunny day, the park was full of couples walking hand in hand, and he had the one person he cared most about standing beside him. _Say it, for Heaven’s—well, for somebody’s sake._

“Well, then,” Crowley said, “I’ve got plants to water. See you for dinner? I’ll pick you up.”

“Oh. Yes. Of course.” 

Aziraphale stood there forlornly as he watched Crowley saunter off down the path. 

“What is _wrong_ with me?” he asked the ducks.

Not a single one of them replied.

Finally, quite late that afternoon as he paced about his closed bookshop, Aziraphale remembered what he had done the last time he’d been faced with a critically important conversation.

It had been his little chat with Gabriel about the missing Antichrist.

What he had done was _rehearse_ the conversation beforehand.

He clapped his hands and smiled. _Of course!_ How could he have been so obtuse?

“Right then,” he spoke to the bookshelves. No wonder he couldn’t talk to Crowley properly about _those_ feelings – he’d had no practice with it. 

So he would rehearse until he found the best words, and he would need to speak them out loud for maximum effect.

He rubbed his hands together, straightened his shoulders, held his head high, and began.

“My dear fellow—“ No, that wasn’t quite right.

“Crowley, me old mate—“ Definitely wrong.

“Um, my dear friend.” Possibly. Better, anyway.

Aziraphale looked at the center of his bookshop, trying to imagine Crowley standing there. No, that wasn’t the right spot.

He went into the back area where they had spent so many pleasant evenings on the sofa, drinking and chatting and just being _friends_. 

Yes, this was the right spot. All he needed now were the right words.

Aziraphale sat on the sofa with his back to the main area of the bookshop. He pretended that Crowley sat beside him. He cleared his throat.

“I’ve got something important to say. It’s about certain feelings I’ve been having since some time ago and they’re rather complicated because we’ve known each for so long and sometimes we didn’t always get along but mostly we did and –“

Oh, bother. That was long-winded enough for a novel.

Should they drink first? Then he could try a toast. Aziraphale rose to get a wine glass, though he didn’t bother filling it. He returned to his spot on the sofa and raised the glass.

“To – to – um, to us!” He lowered the glass. Wrong.

He raised it again. “To friendship!”

Right, but not exactly a declaration of love.

“To…to…to another six thousand years together!” Hm. Possibly. Still not a declaration of anything.

He sighed and set the glass on the coffee table.

Aziraphale considered the more romantic novels he had read over the centuries, and the romantic plays he had seen. Perhaps if he couched his feelings in more literary, poetic terms?

“My dearest ever lovely friend,” he addressed the empty sofa. “Thou art more um, er…thou art more mercurial than a flitting butterfly upon the wing…um…and how do I…er…love thee…let me enumerate the ways.”

He paused. _Enumerate?_

He tried again. “Let me count the ways, which are numerous. That is, there are a lot of ways. Many, many ways in which your very presence softens my days, and um, soft – yes, soft! What light through yonder window breaks – it is, it is something or other. The sun? The moon? Maybe stars?”

Aziraphale sighed. Best to leave poetry to actual poets.

Perhaps if he made it short and simple? 

“Crowley,” he said to the imaginary friend beside him, “I like you. I really, really like you. Lots. A whole lot. Way more than…than…Oh _damn_ , why is it so _hard_ to say what I feel?”

“It’s not hard, Angel.”

“It is, too! I can’t find the right words to tell you that I love—“ Aziraphale gasped. The sofa couldn’t talk. He whirled round.

Crowley stood there only a few feet away, hands in his pockets, sunglasses off. He smiled. “Hello. Came to pick you up for dinner, remember?”

Aziraphale felt a deep flush on his cheeks. “How long have you been standing there?”

“Long enough.” He took his hands from his pockets and closed the gap between them to drop onto the sofa, quite close. “Want me to put you out of your misery?”

“Oh, would you?” Hope flickered through Aziraphale’s chest. “ _Please?”_

“All right.” Crowley turned to face him. He draped an arm around Aziraphale’s shoulders, shifting in even closer.

He kissed Aziraphale’s forehead and whispered, “I feel affection for you.” 

Aziraphale swallowed hard. _Was that all?_

Then Crowley kissed his cheek and said, “I feel friendship for you.”

_Please let there be more_.

And at last, Crowley lightly kissed his lips. “And I feel love.”

_So simple…and yet that easy admission somehow set his whole world aflame_.

Aziraphale brought a hand to Crowley’s face, cradling it, and then he kissed his forehead. “I _do_ feel affection for you.”

He kissed one of his cheeks. “And I _do_ feel friendship for you.”

He touched his fingers to Crowley’s lips. “And I do love you, more than I can find the words to say – and so I won’t speak.” There were other ways to show how he felt. 

He kissed Crowley’s lips, and found a new language there, one that spoke of belonging, of shared joys and comfort, of hurts eased, and of the thousand thousand moments wherein they had found – in each other’s presence – nothing more than a simple contentment.

And then he deepened his touch, lips pressing, mouth opening for a brief taste, warmth spreading – and in that kiss he spoke of the Heaven and Hell which no longer owned them, and of the Earth to which they belonged forever.

He spoke of affection.

He spoke of friendship.

With his lips, he spoke of love.

Aziraphale wrapped himself in Crowley’s love, and kissed his forehead once more, and drifted a feathery touch across his cheek, and trailed a line of affection along his throat down to the soft hairs of his chest. 

Then he gazed into Crowley’s dark-slitted, amber eyes, and he smiled, and said not a word. 

He didn’t have to. 

Later – much later – Crowley said, “Angel, weren’t we going to dinner?”

“Can it wait a while longer, my dear?” Aziraphale replied. He caressed Crowley’s face. “I believe I have some more feelings to express.”

“You’re very good at doing that, you know.”

“Am I?” Aziraphale brightened. “I suppose in the end, it wasn’t that hard.”

Not when the friend you loved made it so easy. 

Talking, he decided, was rather overrated, all in all.


End file.
